


slaying the dragon

by funkandwag



Series: apostrophes [1]
Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 02:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/funkandwag/pseuds/funkandwag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Luna Pentecost was little (little enough to still hold her mum’s hand crossing the street but not little enough to crawl into her parents’ bed when there were monsters), there was a chapter book in the classroom library. -Luna, before the world ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	slaying the dragon

When Luna Pentecost was little (little enough to still hold her mum’s hand crossing the street but not little enough to crawl into her parents’ bed when there were monsters), there was a chapter book in the classroom library. Hardbound (but so cheaply done, the pages would hang from the binding strings if you held it open and face down), yellowing, and marked up with unknown stains, it wouldn’t be allowed in schools, now; too “Rule Britannia” by far, with an unhealthy heaping of religion thrown in.

_The Children’s Life of St George_ , it was called. Only white people and even then, only white people who talked like they read the news; like, even on the page, you could see that they talked Properly, except for the princess, who never said anything and never did anything except wait.

But it had been her favorite; the teacher (she forgets her name, now) would see her reading so much and think she was one of the good ones and try to give her some other book, to expand her horizons. Luna always nodded, once, flipped through, then went back to Saint Georgie. She didn’t need her horizons expanded, thank you very much; she had her mum and her dad and her Stacks (cute when he slept, noisy when awake) and Tottenham and that was enough, for then.

Soon enough, she’d want to launch herself right the fuck out, but she was little then and The Children’s Life of St George was her absolute favorite, because George (silently amended to Georgia, with hair grown a little longer) always won and it was always fine that he won. It wasn’t some inheritance dispute or a series of tests; it was a bloody dragon. No strings attached, no worries about whether it was really fair, no questions like ‘Is it cheating if your mate helps you out or is it just friendship?’ or ‘Why can’t she just rule by herself?’; just a pure sort of righteousness settling itself into her chest each time George(ia) cut off its head.

 

At the age of fourteen, Luna was still a girl and she still lived in Tottenham, which was a damn shame; her favorite class was history and she liked World War II the most, with England making it out all right at the end, battered to hell but still standing. She also liked girls, but it was decidedly not the same sort of liking; no, she liked girls like her heart started beating funny and fast when Aisha smiled at her, like her mouth broke into a stupid grin every time Fatima giggled at her jokes, like girls were supposed to like boys.

Nobody knew. At least, she thought nobody knew. Or, at least, nobody had enough time to even hint at what they knew because, when she was fourteen, Luna’s father was stabbed to death in a nightclub; then, her brother, sweet little Stacker, quiet as a mouse, got quieter, and quieter, until one night the club burned down and her baby brother caught holding the gascan.

Between the funeral and the court hearing, it was almost like Luna Pentecost didn’t exist. The Sister existed, yes; the Daughter existed, of course. But the Sister and the Daughter just mourned and wailed and told any curious passerby the tale of her family’s downfall and how they too could fall like her Brother and Father did, when all Luna Pentecost wanted to tell them was this:

“Dad’d just been out for a pint and even if he hadn’t and he’d been up to something, it wasn’t worth killing over because if it was, we wouldn’t be living in bloody Tottenham, _right_ , we’d be in Chelsea. And if I’d been there, if Stacks had had me, they’d be having two funerals right now: one for my dad and one for the bastard who _murdered_ him. _And_ we wouldn’t’ve gotten caught, all right, because Jimmy Heaney owes me and I probably could’ve gotten him to give us a ride, swear to God.”

But she loved her mum too much. One kid being a fucking nutter was bad enough; two would’ve killed her, maybe literally, maybe just in the quiet sort of way mothers had, the one that froze their hearts until the cells burst, releasing acid that ate away at the flesh, ruining her for anyone who came along after.

So she played Sister and Daughter, hugged Stacker good-bye (and welcome every time a few precious days of holiday rolled around) and slipped away the day after her last exams. Not to university, though her grades were good enough; too long and too pointless. Not to the Met, though she was sure some of them meant well; too ineffective and, if she were being honest, too close to home. (Never knew what’d turn up, with a family like hers.) To the recruiting offices she went, to the RAF; not that much better than uni, not that much more useful than the coppers, but at least she’d get to fly, which as about as far away as you could get.

(Not home; never again.)

 

The first time Luna saw her, they were both rookies out of flight school and standing on the tarmac, waiting to climb into the cockpit for the first time as actual, proper pilots. They were in their flightsuits and her guts felt like they turning themselves inside out and she was wondering why the hell she’d decided on this job, when the ginger woman placed next to her (due to the inexplicable ordering of alphabet)  nudged her in the side.

(A bit closer to elbowing, really, but who kept track?)

The woman turned to her, murmured, so the men couldn’t hear them, because wouldn’t that be just _grand_ , exposing your soft spots when you’d been scaling them over since you stepped into the bloody place, “You nervous?”

And Luna muttered, “Course not.”

“Liar.” Nothing behind it but a crooked little half-smile that’d become as familiar as the freckles  speckled across her cheeks, her shoulders, her back, as all the shiny, nothing-serious-honest-I-swear-to-God-Luna scars she’d accumulated over the years, as nearly everything (but not nearly enough) about her would.

At the time, though, it just seemed like the ginger was grinning about something not quite funny. So Luna had snapped straight back to attention, face rushed with heat; they didn’t talk again until a month later, in the mess, when she plunked herself down next to Luna and bitched to her about the food.

About as good a start as the last one, but-

“Well, it’s the RAF; what do you expect?” (Don’t look up, don’t look up. Don’t give her an opening. Stonewall her.)

“Something that doesn’t have the same texture and color as lizard shit. ” A pause. Then, dropping into the worst Yorkshire accent ever uttered outside of reruns of the bad, old sketch shows: “They could leave the taste, though. Reminds me of Mum’s up north.”

When she stopped laughing (at how stupid it was and how sudden), Luna said, “It probably _is_ lizard shit.”

“Some German science team probably did a whole study on how it improves our bloody eyesight or something.”

“Probably fed them carrots first.”

“The Germans or the lizards?”

“Might not be a difference, right? Never been there, but from what I’ve heard-”

“Cold-blooded, d’you mean?”

And so on, a stream of light, flippant, idiotic bullshitting passed back and forth between them, getting easier and easier; by the time they were out of the hall, they were friends or something close to it.

 

She had always thought Tam was maybe straight. ‘Maybe’ because Luna never had the heart to ask her what it was she fancied exactly (not that you could be exact about that, but you could average it out), because, usually, almost always, it turned out to be ‘straight’. So, don’t ask; _assume_. Better lonely and almost together than awkward and apart, even though together really amounted to ‘how close can I be without her thinking it’s queer?’.

But then-

But then, one night, on leave, it turned out she wasn’t.

It began in a bar. Both of them thirsty, none of them looking to do more than drink and talk.

But then-

But then, some fucking idiot decided to come over; too blind or too drunk or too much of both to see who they were, and certainly too thick to know when a girl wasn’t actually interested in him, as seen in how he didn’t fucking leave even though Tam just kept saying “That’s nice”, like he was some sort of five-year-old.

Luna, having downed a few by this point and having too much of her father and not enough of her mother, said, “Fuck off, mate. She’s not interested.”

And he said something rude about lesbians and-

And Luna lost her _fucking_ mind, then, took a swing at his jaw (bad idea, very bad), with a satisfying shock shooting up her arm that meant she’d hit him hard and the lingering burn of pain that meant, yes, she had but she’d hit the hardest bone in the human body with some of the most fragile ones and-

He swung back. And connected and shamefully knocked her into black.

Luna woke up in a hospital bed, her head fit to crack under the heavy glare of the fluorescents, arm stiff in a cast. Tam was there, just looking at her. Waiting for something. She had two black eyes now, a worrying bit of red seeping across the whites and if that fucker had-

“What were you thinking?” A question asked without expectation of an answer.

“I was thinking, ‘What a shithead.’”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

“...Why d’you have to do reckless shit like that?”

“It’s not reckless, I could’ve-”

“Could’ve what? Sent him to the hospital? Get arrested for assault? I mean, you’re already here for a concussion, could’ve been in the bloody morgue because your nose got pushed back into your fucking brain-”

“So I shouldn’t have done anything?”

“We should’ve just ignored him.”

“Which would’ve been better?”

“Nothing would’ve happened to you, then. And that’s the only thing that matters, all right?”

“...All right.”

  A little while after, they began dating. But before that, they kissed a bit, until Tam knocked against the IV stand and the needle in Luna’s arm started pulling out in an alarming way, so they had to call the nurse to make sure there weren’t “fucking air bubbles in your fucking veins, Jesus Christ, this is serious, Luna, quit laughing”.

 

(Her mother is a doctor.)

 

They had to keep it quiet, of course; fraternizing was frowned upon, could get them kicked out.

She told Stacks anyway. Didn’t mean to, but she still did. He just smiled, thank God; asked if Mum knew, asked when she had talked to Mum last, stopped smiling, stopped asking, and they just sat together at the cafe, because neither of them could remember the last time they’d called home.

He took it harder than her, probably beat himself over it longer, too; Stacks did that. Let things weigh on him, took on more than he should.

Boy wanted to be a martyr. So he called her up.

Luna wanted to be a hero. So she surprised her mother at the supermarket and stole her away to a movie and some dinner and a promise to visit more often, but not a promise to go home; it’d be like getting sucked into a black hole. She’d never leave.

 

A few years passed. She went up a rank; so did Tam. They thought about buying a house together, getting engaged.

They put it off. They’d have time, later.

After a few years, a few months passed. Seismologists reported an uptick in tectonic shifts. More importantly, Mum moved out of the shitty little council flat and into an actual house on an actually nice street. Tam showed up to help pack boxes and maybe it was in the way they looked at each other and maybe it was how easy they were together, but afterwards, when Tam’s ordering carryout, Mum took her aside and told her that it was a shame neither of them were men, because their kids would have been _gorgeous_.

She didn’t correct her on anything(like, first of all, maybe Tam could’ve had a penis or maybe Luna preferred to be called Luke), because it was more than enough that her mother was all right with it.

A few days after that, the new fighters came in. Tam and her went off on “holiday” (read: training).

A few hours after that, the world began to end.

 

The day her world ended, she woke up early. She ate some breakfast. She got the call. She grinned.

Old St. Georgie could eat his heart out; Luna Pentecost was going dragon hunting.


End file.
